Alright, it's time for me to pick this up again

The 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine
3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson
5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell
6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb
8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang
11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley
12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson
13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese
15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi
17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence
18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark
19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard
21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber
22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru
23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux
24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot
32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain
34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou
38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew
39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France
40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca
41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon
42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith
43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark
45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling
46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton
48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman
49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni
50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

6 months in TZ

Well March 11th marked the 6 month point of my life in TZ.  A lot of things have happened in that time.  I turned 30, very happily here.  I have made friends.  I have begun to learn a 4th language.  I have become mostly comfortable with driving on the left side of the "road."  I have become comfortable with the idea of parasites that inevitably cycle in and out of my life.  I have definitely grown in my position as the boss.  I have become more and more attached to the amazing kids I live with.  I have started to realize this place as a home.  And seen the importance of growing roots to a place.

It's a strange feeling, feeling at home in the unfamiliar.

You know you live in Africa when...

T. I. A.  is something you hear tossed around a lot here.  It stands for This Is Africa.  And there are definitely a lot of great stories that end that way.  So as I am starting to get more acquainted with my new home I thought I would share a few quick ones.

I live a few kilometers from the edge of Ngorongoro Crater so when my friend Christy and I go for walks at six am we try to be very cautious about where we go, but when we went out in the middle of the day we did not expect to end up face to face with a Bull Elephant but then T.I.A.

Today I had the clinic confirm that I have my second round of parasites in the last two weeks.  T.I.A.
Best part about that is when I asked the doctor if it was a large infection or small he said.  Well, it isn't too big, but when you see a hippo in a pond you don't jump in to find out how big it is you just walk away.  I -laughed my butt off- and said ok.


New Year's Eve I spent drinking some wine with the volunteers until midnight when people from the nearby settlement showed up with drums singing and dancing.  It was amazing we ran out to the gate to meet them and danced and chanted some songs with them.

There are always different moments you experience living abroad that trigger a strong reminder that you are ... where ever it is that you are.  Seeing peanut butter in the foreign food isle in German grocery stores would always make me smile; but for me it's staring out the window as I travel that is when I fall in love with the new country I am living in.  In Germany I could stare out the train window for hours, in Azerbaijan it was the mini bus (even as I was bumping along) I would love to watch the terrain change in front of me, in Tanzania it is the same thing.  Driving on the tarmack from Arusha to Karatu I am blown away each time at what is out my window.  It's not just the giraffes or baboons that I may see as I pass that remind my I live in Africa.  It's not just the poor cows I saw dead and dying a few months ago before the rains came -- or how different the landscape is after any change in weather.  It isn't even simply how the green pops off the red dirt (although I do love that).  I really think it is all of that mixed with the vastness that reminds me of where I am.

you should see the other guy

Looking Awesome after the safari took a turn...

very old fashioned dance party

And tonight we are Maasai. I am pretty excited, look for pictures. I have been gathering my outfit all day. I have my jewelery, I have my shuka, and I have a Maasai Warrior to show me how wear it. Now all I have to do is try to focus on work until the end of the day when and play dress up, eat grilled meats, and dance. And just to prove that I haven't gone full native yet, there will be apple pie at this party. Because what's a party without pie?

Attempting the impossible

Alright, no matter from what part of my life you know me from, you will all pretty much know I enjoy dancing. Some have countless nights watching me prove just that on the dance floor (Maggie) some of you have just laughed your butts of at me managing to must a move in the car going through the drive through at In N Out (pretty much anyone who's ever been with me at that great moment right before you get the no. 2 combo). And let's say you have never been with me when George Michael, Salt n Peppa, or Journey came on the radio you could probably still infer from my general love of econ-podcasts that despite my great love to dance there are certain limits to my skill.
That all being said, when I do hit the dance floor I typically try to find some local girls, make friends and learn some new moves (Yep, Ash what's true in AZ, Honduras is still true all the way in TZ). So far I have gone out twice here, and both times I have had an awesome time. I have danced with great local ladies and they teach me what they can, but I do believe they are all trying to lasso the moon when each and every one of them have attempted to teach this girl booty shaking. I mean I fully believe there must be some joint in their backsides that I am missing. The first step in all these moves is to turn around and look at your own butt, right well let's start there. Because I turn, even using everything I ever learned in Yoga when I turn, there's nothing there to see. So right from the jumping off point I have failed, there's just no booty to shake. But not to be a quitter I commit, I turn and look at the place where I should be seeing booty and then try my best to shake what I haven't got. It's a lot like playing make believe. Like when my sisters and I were little and pretended our bikes were horses and feed them grass.
It's a bit of insanity but every time I hit the floors here the local chicks and I both seem to share the same illusion that I am turning and seeing something I don't have and shaking it with some muscle or joint I have not been genetically provided with. It's a fantasy. But again like playing as child it's a fun fantasy and not one I am prepared to give up. So as long as I am here I am going to keep trying and attempting the impossible and achieving my dream on the dance floor.

Hope you are all doing great!

An evening drive under African skies

These are taken during the same sunset on the drive back from Arusha to Karatu. The sky here seems so much bigger than at home.